Australian Blogging Conference – Citizen Journalism

The conference continued after lunch and a launch of Dr Marett Leiboff’s book “Creative Practice and the Law”. I attended the session on “Citizen Journalism” with its panel of Axel Bruns, Graham Young and Rachel Cobcroft (picture credit: Mark Bahnisch at Facebook). Bruns opened the session. Dr Axel Bruns is a lecturer at the Creative Industries Faculty of conference host QUT. Bruns is an active researcher about blogs and their impact and is co-editor with Joanne Jacobs of a collection of scholarly articles called “Uses of Blogs”.

Bruns began by referring to Possums Pollytics (a site that was proving to be a very popular exemplar at several sessions at the conference). Bruns said “(possums pollytics) analyses polls from a scientific perspective rather than a Liberal Party perspective”. Bruns showed how the site forensically skewered a Christopher Pearson article in The Australian which framed the long list of unfavourable polls in a positive light for the Howard Government.

Bruns said the challenge for the blogosphere was to work together “rather than fighting each other”. From his research Bruns noted that the bulk of political blogs was left of centre but he had not come to any firm conclusions why this was the case. Possibilities included the fact that there was now more of a leaning to the left or perhaps simply that more people blogged from the left. Bruns then said that photojournalism might be an easier entry into citizen journalism. He used the example of the British Guardian newspaper’s Blair Watch project in the 2005 election. It ended up with a vast library of photos from the campaign.

Graham Young focussed on his latest project “Youdecide2007” which was actively seeking citizen journalists. Youdecide2007 is a user-driven forum for a seat-by-seat coverage of the 2007 Australian federal election. The project is led by the Creative Industries faculty at QUT, funded by the ARC, and supported by project partners SBS, On Line Opinion (OO), and the Brisbane Institute.

Young said Youdecide2007 will mine a similar territory to his OO site however while OO seeks elite opinion, the writers of Youdecide2007 will be “just like us”. He said the centralisation of media empires means there are fewer journalists on the ground especially in less populated areas. Youdecide2007 will use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates. It is slowly growing with 6,000 visitors this week up from 2,000 the week before. Young said “at this rate of progress, it will have more visitors than Online Opinion by the end of the election”.

The site has already had its first success with “Crategate”, an interview in Townsville with the Liberal member for Herbert Peter Lindsay. According to Margaret Simons in Crikey (27 September edition) Lindsay “perhaps had looser lips faced with a citizen than he would have had with a denizen of the Canberra Press Gallery”. Lindsay said issues of housing affordability were to do with the “financial illiteracy” of young people and their desire to have all the consumer goods too soon. He went on to say: “I’m just stating the facts... in years gone by people were more responsible. I remember in my own case we sat on milk crates in the lounge room until we could afford chairs.”

The “milk crate” quote formed the basis of a question in Parliament from Kevin Rudd to John Howard: “Does the Prime Minister agree with the Member for Herbert when he says that mortgage stress can be blamed on financially illiterate couples and his only advice to them is that they should sit on "milk crates in the lounge room" until they can afford chairs? Apart from the milk crate solution, what is your plan to deal with Australia's housing affordability crisis or is it simply to blame the states?" The Rudd quote got a run in a number of mainstream media outlets.

Young said the affair was not an unconditional victory for Rudd but it does show the potential power of citizen journalism. Young went on to walk the conference participants through the Youdecide2007 site and said more work needed to be done to differentiate between “premium” and “raw” content and to populate the news archive, media releases and opinion archive. Young said the site “did not encourage too much opinion, there is already too much around”. Rachel Cobcroft was then supposed to walk through a presentation on her PhD thesis about user-led content creation in Flickr.com. Unfortunately, technical gremlins forced her to cancel the demo.

The final session of the day was called “the future for your blog: promoting your blog and building traffic” led by Des Walsh and Yaro Starak. Des Walsh is a business coach and self confessed “blogging fanatic” while Yaro Starak is a young entrepreneur who has managed many Internet start-up businesses since the late 1990s. Walsh and Starak provided a host of great tips and websites to explore to increase blog traffic including Frappr maps article marketing, digg, stumbleupon!, digital point, ning, blogrush, blog carnivals and many others.

After the conference, I joined several bloggers who took the opportunity to continue the discussions at the nearby Normanby hotel. See the following sites for more thoughts about the day. David Novakovic, Duncan McLeod, Kate Davis, Suzie Cheel, Peta Hopkins and Bogosity.

Australian Blogging Conference – The Politics of Blogging

The early morning panel session was the only formal part of the Australian Blogging Conference where all the participants were in the same room. After morning tea, the conference broke up into four breakout rooms to discuss intriguing issues that affect the blogosphere. After much indecision on which one to attend, I plumped for “the politics of blogging” over “blogs, creativity and the creative commons”, “researching blogging” and “legal issues.”

This session had a four person panel including Senator Andrew Bartlett, Brett Solomon, Graham Young and the facilitator Mark Bahnisch. Bahnisch opened up the forum. Mark Bahnisch is a Brisbane academic and prodigious online writer and commentator. He is a sociologist in the School of Arts at Griffith University and is the custodian of the political and cultural group blog Larvatus Prodeo. He also contributes for Crikey, Online Opinion and New Matilda.

He began the session by remarking that contrary to claims, blogs were hierarchical in format, with a system of a title page, posts and comments. He saw himself as less of a blogging evangelist and has a “more modest view” of where blogging is going. He saw it as “a conversation not a platform”. He compared the Australian blogosphere to its American counterpart and observed we are “not getting there”. The US equivalent exercises far more influence in both politics and money. Bahnisch suggested that may be no bad thing. He said the notion that the US is the template for Australian blogs was a cliché as was the claim that “blogging wasn’t journalism”. He quoted the Australian’s editor Chris Mitchell who praised his newspaper’s coverage of opinion polling because “unlike Crikey, we understand Newspoll because we own it”.

Bahnisch said that ownership in this context “was something not physical”. What The Australian meant was: “we own the right to decide who enters political discourse in this country and on what terms”. He said the real audience for the newspaper’s media narratives were the other participants in politics and the media in Canberra. Mitchell dismissed bloggers as “sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper”. Bahnisch said Mitchell is afraid of the barbarians at the gate and weaves a “web of spin that has a political purpose”.

Bahnisch turned to Australia’s thriving psephological blogs and said what they do best is “aggregate distributed knowledge”. The mainstream media are resentful of this but gradually accepting their existence. Dennis Atkins quoted the blogs ozpolitics and possums pollytics by name this week in the Murdoch owned Brisbane Courier-Mail. Bahnisch said these blogs raise the level of accountability, aggregate and wrap up commentary, as well as interface with the major media.

Bahnisch then asked where is the Australian version of the Daily Kos and said “it was good we don’t have one”. He said the Australian blogosphere was best appreciated for its value not its influence. He quoted Margaret Simons’ interview with Club Troppo’s Nicholas Gruen. Simons asked Gruen what was the business model for blogging. Gruen said it was the gift economy. Gruen gives freely of his time and his knowledge base and in return it enriches his life and makes it more meaningful. Bahnisch said “maybe we should monetise our blogs but if we did that we would write about Paris Hilton”.

Bahnisch said we don’t have the audience they have in the US. But political blogs here provide a service. He said the test case for the Australian blogosphere will be the 2007 federal election. But he cautioned that bloggers “had been marked and failed before we got to the exam room”. There were two reasons for this, according to Bahnisch. Firstly, the view from the US was that the 2004 presidential election was the glory year for the blogs and by the time of the 2006 congressional election, the big narrative was that “people were sick of the blogosphere”. Secondly he said the space had been appropriated by the mainstream media, Google News and others who had “sucked the oxygen out of the audience of political bloggers”. He pointed out how Tim Dunlop was recruited from the blogosphere to write for News Corp but had a post removed when it criticised his own newspaper. Bahnisch believes there remains a niche for political blogs. “But they are not going to set the world on fire,” he said. “Blogs are just one node in the political conversation”.

Brett Solomon spoke next. Brett is the executive director of the online activist organisation “Getup!” Solomon said he was no expert on blogging and admitted the Getup! blog “did not have a lot of sugar”. But he added that was about to change soon. Their blog entries did sometimes attract six hundred to a thousand comments a day “when they hit their mark”. Solomon said it was exciting to tap into a community out there that wants to speak. Getup! has 200,000 members who were “not opposed to speaking out loud and have their words acted upon”. He saw it as a forum where people could say “I have a view on that and I can link in with others with similar views”. Solomon said legitimate interests were sidelined because they cannot get access to power. He also showed the ad (see video at bottom of post below) they were planning to run on AFL and ARL Grand Final days once they raised the $200,000 needed to get the airtime.

He said the other important thing was the use of the exposé. He said land rights were “the most important thing you’ve never heard of”. The government has ripped the guts out of the land rights laws with little debate. But there was outrage in the community. Their blog entry “our land, our rights” attracted 909 comments with many indigenous commenters. But there is no other media space for them. The Australian wasn’t interested, nor was the Sydney Morning Herald, nor ABC Radio National. The law was passed in parliament after just one day’s debate. Solomon said Getup! aims to engage people and “build a progressive Australia”. Its blog was a small element in bringing people together with 200,000 others “who actively agree with me”.

Andrew Bartlett didn’t not contribute greatly after his valuable input to the first session. He was also forced to leave the session early to catch a plane. He did say that the real value of blogs was the “conversation with the community”. It is less about critical mass than diversity. He said only about 80,000 people a day read The Australian but its readership is influential. He said the nature of Australian party politics lent itself to the culture of followers.

Graham Young was the final speaker. Young is a writer, and a former vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party. He is also chief editor of Online Opinion. Young said the reason he blogged was that he “wanted to have some significance”. He said Online Opinion was owned by the not-for-profit National Forum and published six quality articles a day by a diversity of authors. He said there were few regular contributors. He saw it as a constantly assembled daily newspaper and a way of opening up public discourse without the “gatekeepers Packer and Murdoch”.

Young also addressed the question of difference between the US and Australia. He said there has been no Rathergate here and no “gotchas”. But he looked at the six entries in the Online Opinion on the day and said there were all “idiosyncratic”. None of them were about the big stories of the day covered by the newspapers. There was nothing about Rudd anointing Swan for the treasury or the health crisis in NSW, which Young believes, people are more interested in. He said that if blogs don’t have the audience, they don’t have relevance.

Young concluded his arguments by saying “we should stop thinking of blogs as blogs”. They also exist in platforms such as Myspace and Facebook. He said “blogs have outlived where they are at” and more co-operation was needed. We also need to monetise to get to the next level. He said Australia needs more group blogs and clusters. After Young finished, conference sponsor Dan Walsh spoke briefly about a new project called Kwoff, a collaboration between Walsh, Stephen Mayne and Greg Barns. Walsh said Kwoff will be an Australian version of digg where they will put news to the vote to help users decide what is interesting content. Kwoff will be launched on Monday.

GetUp! grand final ad:

Australian Blogging Conference – Morning Panel discussion

The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) hosted a highly successful first ever Australian Blogging Conference today at its Kelvin Grove campus in Brisbane. The conference brought together some of Australia’s most prominent bloggers as discussion leaders and almost a hundred participants to the day-long event. Conference convenor Peter Black (QUT law lecturer and ardent blogger) put together a superb event with help from sponsors Microsoft, Getup! and Kwoff.

Professor Michael Lavarch opened the first session. Lavarch is a former federal attorney-general in the Paul Keating administration and is now Professor of Law and Executive Dean of the QUT faculty of law. Lavarch believed today’s conference was the first of its type in Australia. He said blogging was a remarkable phenomenon. The word blog is barely a decade old and was first coined around 1997. By 2004 Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary declared it the word of the year. The number of bloggers is estimated to rise to 100 million in the next few years.

Lavarch said his team at QUT led by Professor Bryan Fitzgerald were at the forefront of the information revolution with its open access and information exchange. He confessed he was not a blogger but was a consumer of blogs. In particular Lavarch praised possum pollytics as the ‘most incisive’ of the Australian political blogs. Lavarch held out great hopes for the future of political, legal and citizen journalism.

Fellow QUT professor of law Bryan Fitzgerald spoke next. His brief speech covered off two points. Firstly he thanked Peter Black for organising the event and praised him as ‘one of our bright up and coming academics’ and a tremendous ambassador for the law school. Secondly he thanked the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) who were fellow hosts of the conference. Established in 2005, the centre of excellence is geared to support creative innovation, innovation policy and creative human capital.

Peter Black then introduced a three man panel who led the debate, John Quiggin, Senator Andrew Bartlett and Duncan Riley. John Quiggin began the discussion. Quiggin is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow in Economics and Political Science at the University of Queensland. Quiggin was an early adopter of blogs, starting in 2002. He began by admitting he always wanted a blog. He said it was a technology waiting to happen and appeal to the desire of people who wanted to diarise.

Quiggin said that when he started there was barely 50 Australians who blogged and it was possible ‘to read them all in one sitting’. But as the blogosphere grew, the diary element became much less dominant. Issues now motivate people to blog, he said. Blogging has removed barriers to access and the format is now being copied by the mainstream media. Comments gave people a chance to have their say and broke down the distinction between writers and readers. Quiggin thought that group blogs (Quiggin himself is a member of Crooked Timber) were the way of the future but said his only disappointment was that ‘the technology hasn’t got any easier to use’.

Senator Andrew Bartlett then took the floor. Bartlett has been a senator for Queensland since 1997 and is running for re-election again this time round. He is one of the few politicians who actively blogs. Bartlett said he focussed on the political side of blogging but admitted that knitting blogs were ten times more popular and food blogs probably ten times more popular again. The senator said he follows the wider nature of social networks and finds the ‘viral aspect’ fascinating about how information spreads through communities and sub-communities. He said it was ‘another way for people to connect when traditional methods have broken down’.

Bartlett believes that the real value of blogs is their ability to encourage wider discussion of issues. He gently mocked the mainstream media press gallery who see themselves as the custodians of ‘received wisdom’. They are feeling threatened by blogs who are making an impression because of their quality. He said it was becoming “almost an alternative commentariat – but with more diversity”. Bartlett also liked the nature of comments and the cross-fertilisation of commenters’ material. He finished by saying the best thing about blogs was that they were simply there. “The blogosphere is authentic,” he said. “Unvarnished, not going through a filter, warts and all”.

Duncan Riley spoke last. Riley is a writer, developer and self-confessed ‘blogging evangelist’. He began by disagreeing with Professor Quiggin about group blogs being the way of the future. He did see a bright future for very large 24 by 7 news cycle blogs speaking to an ‘always on, always connected’ audience. But he said the single author blog was the medium’s ‘bread and butter’. He pointed out that the best news sources coming out of Burma at the moment are bloggers. He agreed with Bartlett that the Australian media have a “terrible phobia” about blogs. They have them but are not doing a very good job with them.

Riley predicted a coming ‘tipping point’ in the evolution of the Australian blogosphere. He said there were somewhere between half a million and 700,000 bloggers in the country. Beyond that there were 2 million people in Myspace and 250,000 on Facebook plus a growing presence from Bebo. In all Riley calculated that there were “three or four million” people in Australia with blogs or access to a blogging platform via their social network. But he said there was no site like the American Daily Kos to “capture our imagination”. Riley said that collectively we have done so little together. He said there was a “dog eat dog” mentality that hampered growth. He finished by saying there were great photoblogs out there “doing wonderful things but haven’t got the audience."